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Obama Knows It: Community Colleges Rule
Here's a good-news story from the US reminds us how easily we could cut student debt in Canada.
Yesterday, in announcing his American Graduation Initiative yesterday, President Obama laid out plans for a $12-billion investment in community colleges.
Yes, it's spread over the next 10 years, but this focus on upgrading the overworked, under-nourished US community college sector is unprecedented.
In writing for Debt 101, I've often said that community colleges are a key way for students to cut costs and lower student loan debt. Your resume only shows where you got your degree.
No one knows or cares where you spent your first year or two after high school (before transferring your credits to university). Community colleges may be no-frills, but you may have a better chance to know your prof and you can save thousands of dollars by starting there.
That's one of the reasons that Quebec students have lower student debt than most other Canadians: Quebec wisely maintains a universal CEGEP (community college) system. Ontario once had this advantage in the form of Grade 13, but it was scrapped, adding another year of costs to post-secondary students.
This kind of government boost to community colleges would make a great initiative across the rest of Canada but it seems unlikely, since education is not high on the radar screen now.
But if Canadian politicians or educators can find a way to team up, perhaps Canadian students could benefit from one key feature in Obama's American Graduation Initiative: a new online education service. Presumably this would have features smilar to the Open Learning Institute in Canada and the UK. Makes us wonder if online education services could start sharing more resources internationally.
In creating the new online skills laboratory, the US Departments of Defense, Education, and Labor would team up with community colleges to offer free online courses. The goal is to improve career opportunities for mature and rural students, without loading them up with education debt.
But there is even more to this good news for Americans.
The president's proposal was introduced today as part of legislation to make college more affordable. And to pay for these initiatives, Obama and congressional leaders plan to save tens of billions of dollars by reforming the student loan system to remove subsidies paid to banks and private lenders.
Pretty sweet, unless you're in the now-corrupt US private loans biz. But we did recently mention in these pages just how shaky these companies looked now as an investment!
For a news report on Obama's community college initiative from the Christian Science Monitor's online paper, click here.
For the main-plate enchilada (a White House statement with full details), click here.
© Jeannine Mitchell 2009-2012
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